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Charting the past and present: Iranian immigrant and ethnic experience through poetry.

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Iranians take poetry quite seriously--a habit that tends to lend a certain poetic diction to our historical recollections, the way we remember ourselves. If jazz is the cadence of American culture, as Robert O'Meally has put it recently in the title of his magnificent volume on the subject, then Persian poetry is the pulse of Iranian culture, the rhyme and rhythm of its collective memory. It is said that what Muslims do is not memorize the Qu'ran but Qu'ranify their memory. If that is what Muslims do, then that must be what Iranians do too with their poetry, when they remember their past as the poetic resonance of their present-in fact, of their presence in history.

--Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (13)

If we take Hamid Dabashi's statement about Iranians and poetry to its logical conclusion in the context of the Iranian diaspora in North America, we can see why poetry would be crucial in expressing some of the collective experiences and sentiments of Iranian Americans who immigrated to or were raised in North America in the three decades since the 1979 revolution. Poetry of the Iranian diaspora is an important source of continuity, connecting Iranians to the voice of their past, and to a nation that was dramatically disrupted by the events of the 1979 revolution. At the same time, poetry provides a medium to articulate and express an Iranian American identity and "presence" in North America. Long before the prominence of Iranian American memoirs, poetry was the first genre of writing that registered the tenor of Iranian immigrant sensibility, and was infused with experiences of alienation, exile, loss, and a sense of reckoning with new locale(s) in North America. It has also been a medium for articulating Iranian Americans' "hybrid identities and syncretic cultures that symbolically borrow from both the indigenous society and the new one to which they have located" (Naficy 17).

Poetry was a natural and familiar genre for many Iranian immigrants to express themselves; poetry has historically enjoyed a revered status in Iranian culture both in the classical and modern periods. During Iran's modern history (from 1921 until 1979 when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown) poets expressed the widespread aspirations for democratic change and the alienation of many Iranians in times of severe government censorship and political repression. In the modernist period of Iran, "poetry was invested with political themes and social criticism; to do this poets broke the centuries-old bonds of genre forms and stylized language" (Fischer 166). This same novel expression of political themes and social criticism has continued in the poetry of Iranian immigrants and their American-born children who have been drawn to poetry to register the social and personal impact of the 1979 revolution and its fallout, and the ongoing and tense relations between the US and Iran during the past three decades. And like the shift that took place in the modernist period in Iran--breaking from the traditions of classical poetry Iranian American poetry both has drawn on its heritage and been reshaped and hybridized to fit the concerns, language, and context of North America.

For Iranian Americans poetry has served as the medium of continuity between Iran and the US, but it has also particularly spoken to the fractured relationship between Iran and the US. This conflict has left many Iranian Americans feeling physically and psychologically cut off" from, outside of, and unwilling to return to the Islamic Republic of Iran, but not yet integrated or accepted in American society and culture. This "outsiderness" has lessened somewhat with the passage of time. Throughout the 1990s and the early part of this decade, the pain and discomfort expressed in the poetry of the immigrant generation evolved into the more cosmopolitan analysis and comic irony found in the memoirs, essays, and somewhat more hip poetry of the American-born/raised generation; Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad, Firoozeh Dumas's Funny in Farsi, or Mariam Salari's "Ed McMahon is Iranian" are examples of this trend. But recently, as renewed tensions between the two nations have again intensified, Iranian American poetry has resumed some of its original "exilic" and political tendencies. Iranian American poetry is diverse, but the theme of emotional and cultural loss that accompanied exile, migration, and the subsequent demonization of Iran and Iranian culture beginning in 1979, has reoccurred and even intensified since September 11.

In The Making of Exile Cultures, Hamid Naficy identifies exile as "a process of becoming, involving separation from home, a period of liminality and in-betweenness that can be temporary or permanent, and incorporation into the dominant host society that can be partial or complete" (8-9). This in-betweenness is captured by a number of Iranian American poets who display an attention to both American and Iranian language, cultural symbols, rituals, and icons, paying homage to Iran's well-established poetic tradition, while also departing from it. They articulate the complex sensibilities of the Iranian immigrant experience before and after the 1979 revolution (when the largest migration of Iranians occurred) as well as after September 11. This growing body of poetry written in English by Iranian American poets is full of the nuance, complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions that its authors have experienced.

Iranian American poetry speaks to political, cultural, and cross-cultural themes such as the aftermath and upheaval of the revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988); exile (both voluntary and involuntary); loss of language and cultural context, especially between generations; discrimination and threats in the US after the taking of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran...

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